Jia Tolentino interviewed Susan Robinson, one of only four American abortionists who openly perform third-trimester abortions. Robinson is featured in the new documentary After Tiller, which premiered in New York last weekend...
From hairpin.com:
Tolentino: I was really moved and amazed by the scene where you're writing down a baby’s name, noting the family’s request for a memory box and a viewing, showing the little ink footprints. Do families often want to engage with their baby like this after an abortion? How many people are ready to—as you say—say hello to their baby at the same time that they’re telling it goodbye?
Robinson: With fetal anomaly patients, we ask them right up front if they plan to hold their baby after it's born. These patients, their emotional needs are so different from the ones who are looking at their pregnancy as an absolute disaster, who are just thinking, “Get it out of me, please, please, please.” Those patients—the maternal indications patients—they are not relating to their fetus as a baby, they’re relating to it as a problem.
But with a fetal indications patient—if she refers to it as her baby, I'll refer to it as her baby. If she’s named the baby, I’ll use the baby’s name too. I would say that most of these patients do decide to see and hold their baby, although many of them have a hard time dealing with the idea at first. We’ll take remembrance photographs, we’ll give them a teddy bear, the footprints. I mean, imagine being six months pregnant and finding out your baby’s missing half its brain, and you’ve got this nursery you’ve painted at home, you’re so ready—I don’t want them to go home from the procedure with absolutely nothing to remember and honor the baby, and its birth.
Tolentino: Wow. You’ll say “birth?”
Robinson: Yes. I try to mirror what will be the most consoling to the patient. In general, these patients – fetal indications – do talk about giving birth, so I’ll say that as well.
After Robinson said she sometimes will say “non-denominational prayers” with the mother and the family following the abortion, Tolentino wondered about this seemingly “macabre” situation of loving a baby in one’s arms “that you just committed yourself to ending its life…”
“That’s not macabre!” said Robinson. “Yes, that’s the first part of the procedure. We sedate the patient and euthanize their fetus, their baby, with an injection. The fetus passes away, doesn’t feel anything.”
Nope. Nothing macabre about killing someone, then calling it "birth" and cradling the just-killed carcass lovingly.
5 comments:
Umm. Okay, a baby with half a brain. Is there some reason we want a child saddled with half a brain? There has to be a point where you say "I accept the responsibility for ending this badly damaged child's life".
I'd be asking God's forgiveness every day 'til I died, but it's the decision I would probably make.
Of course, I am sitting here with a grown son in college and no such prospect in front of me. But my son has asked me for advice on this very topic.
What can I tell him, Stan? That will not make me out as some kind of monster either way?
Also... carcass refers to a dead animal body. Corpse refers to humans. Though the treatement at this stage can hardly be told apart.
Steven,
I see no reason, either logically or morally, to kill an infant which might live, albeit with infirmities. My extended family had a severely retarded individual who was very happy and a blessing until she died at around 40 or so.
However, there certainly are cases where the preborn is actually toxic to the mother (for whatever reason) and under triage principles of saving the one most likely to survive, the mother should be saved at the expense of the preborn. However, all resonable effort to save both should morally be used.
In the case of certain death shortly after natural birth, it is still possible to give the pre/post natal every chance, and it is possible to give s/he every comfort including freedom from pain. That s/he might enjoy at least some love from Mother.
Parenting is a responsibility, which seems to me to be abdicated by killing a fetus which is alive, even if it is deformed somehow.
It used to be the case that spina bifida was terminal; now it seems that it is easily remedied, even in utero (I think I read). And now it is projected to be possible to use stem cells to grow brain cells which actually seek their proper attachment locations (referenced currently to blindness, but seemingly extensible to further use).
In the case of radical encephalitis where there is massive fluid in the cranium rather than very much brain matter, there have been several cases of normal intelligence resulting anyway, including one man in England who got a degree in matehematics. He had only a coating of brain material on the inside surface of his skull, the rest being filled with fluid. Not saying that such cases are the rule, or even common, but who knows?
At any rate, any moral principles will conflict with practical wishes and even logic in these cases. That's what makes it hard and tests the commitment to moral principles.
Still, logic can be used within the constraints of moral commitment.
All that being said, there is no reason to use what I say as final moral reasoning; I have never claimed moral authority and I don't right now. Your moral source and your logic should dominate.
Steven, psychotic animals like Susan Robinson love to use extreme cases as if they were the norm. That anyone could be so callous as to refer to third trimester baby's who can survive outside the womb, who are fully formed, as fetal anomalies is just frightening.
They want to act as though the extreme case is the norm, when in reality 99% of her murders are of healthy pre-born children, not the badly deformed or chronically ill.
@Stan and Rikalonius: understood. I know what my moral obligation is, I am just afraid I might not be strong enough to practice it at the sticking point. And I hesitate to advise someone else to go a course I have never had to stick to myself.
Stan, thanks for that clarification. It was what I needed... as Lewis once wrote (and it was a quote of someone else), 'people do not need to be instructed so much as they need to be reminded'.
Rikalonius, you are most assuredly correct. Susan's language is... deeply disturbing. She has made the murder of an innocent into something as clinically detached as possible. There is no pity or tears or remorse. What she has slowly turned herself into is a warning to the rest of us.
And in selecting the worst possible scenario while concealing its rarity is a sign that she *knows* what she is doing - concealing the ugly truth. And she does it anyway. She is simply covering her amoral ass.
I try to prepare my son for worst-case scenarios, to be sure. But that's not what he's going to encounter, most likely. He was asking me about abortion in general, and we talked about it for a long time. My position is much the same as Stan's, though I proposed ending the child's life if it were hopelessly handicapped (no brain, missing organs, etc).
The difference was that in the old days, we bore the child to term without knowing what, if anything, was wrong. We dealt with the problem once the child was born, as best we could.
Now we can see serious issues coming before the child is born, and as with a lot of things in the modern world, ethics has not caught up with technology. But I told my son it was not an ethical debate whether to kill a child because it was inconvenient to the parents, regardless of its health. Murder is murder and it is forbidden to us as men - Christian or otherwise. Evil acts are still evil - even if they come from such a banal source as a selfish or lazy prospective parent.
One last: yeah, Stan, I read about that guy. Textbook case of the mind functioning without what anyone else would consider a normal brain to 'create' it. I believe (and I have used this case to teach my son) that the mind is something that works *through* the brain. And it would appear we need very little to maintain a fully working connection.
But as you said, this is an exceptional case.
Steve
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